Valladolid, Castile-León, Spain
I realized that I assumed that so many people knew what I know here in Spain. I also realize that sentence is incredibly generalized, so allow me to explain with an example: in my haste to write about the airports and Segovia and exciting experiences, I forgot the simple, core details of my experience here so far. I’ll start with the most important part of my trip – my family. If you haven’t already caught on from my rambling about my family, I LOVE THEM, and they are the corazon of this experience for me. Sonia is my host mom, and she is absolutely gorgeous. She has naturally pure, olive skin and she wears a touch of blue eyeliner on her top lid every day. Her hair is short, a little less than shoulder length, and naturally curly/wavy. It’s kind of flyaway and she looks like a beautiful jungle woman walking outside in the wind. Haha. And yes I pay attention to these interesting details. She is shorter than me, about 5′3” and of course tiny tiny tiny. Sonia looks like she runs 10 miles a day with her lean form, but she just eats and walks like the rest of the Spaniards here. (Stay tuned for my “Spanish Diet” proposal.) Antonio is slightly balding, has a bit of an adorable belly, but is slim everywhere else on his body. He’s taller than I am, but not by a whole lot. I would give him 5′10”. He always wears work pants and a button up long sleeved shirt to work, at home, etc. Inigo is incredibly skinny and incredibly introverted. He sits in his room all day and plays on the computer/watches television with his door closed. He talks to me if I say hi, but it’s just in response, and then he re-enters his cave. Inigo has dark, kind of wavy/possibly just messy hair, and a little baby face. He’s actually a quite handsome little man, but at 16 no facial hair yet for the 16 year old cuties in his school to run their hands over. Fernando is 22, and works at the bar that he and his family own together. Sonia and Fer work there every day but Sunday. He’s the most animated of the family, and the most hairy. Ha! He has dark features like Inigo, but some facial hair once and a while, and thicker eyebrows and hair than his younger brother. When he was little he competed in horseback competitions. There are baby and childhood pictures of these two all over the house. They also have a turtle, which I play with and feed in the livingroom once and a while.
A little about our daily life together…
Sonia cleans everyday, and cleans WELL. When we get home from the bar after eating lunch during siesta, she has already pretty much cleaned everything – the floors, the two bathrooms, our bedroom, everyone’s rooms, the kitchen… She had a broken dishwasher up until a few days ago, so at that time she was also doing a daily gigantic load of dishes along with daily laundry. When we get back, she is usually just about finished with cleaning, and later Antonio gets home from work (siesta for our family lasts from about 2 until 6) and they sit and relax on the couch together. Once and a while I squeeze in on the couch with them if I’m writing in my journal or want to watch the news. Every day after school Zina and I walk to the bar around 2, which is when classes end (they start at either 10:30 or 9:30 am and go for 3 hours with a descanso (break) of 20 minutes somewhere in there). We usually go upstairs and get on the internet/do homework/I write in my daily journal while we wait for food. We usually don’t eat until 3 or 3:30, which is a long time for me to wait without food. Somehow I manage. Once we walk our 50 – hour long walk home, we relax for a bit and then either go to an internet cafe or bar to do homework and write to our dear friends and family and do homework or go wander the streets. I like either walking by myself and “getting lost” with my map and finding new churches or buildings or meeting up with others in our program to chat in a cafe or bar. Fernando and I run about every other day for around 30 minutes around Campo Grande, the giant park by our house, at about 9 pm when he gets home from work at the bar. Currently I’m looking into working here as well, to make some extra euros on the side. A family wants Zina and I to teach their daughters English – there’s two daughters, 11 and 13, so we would each get one. Another family that Sonia knows wants me to teach their 17 year old. Looks like pay here is about 10 euros an hour, which is 40 a week if I work 2 hours with each family per week. I want to save up to make an extra trip (to Greece?????) for myself – oh, and of course with a trusted friend. (wink wink to Safety, because traveling alone is NOT safe and I would NEVER think to put myself in immediate danger in a foreign country.)
I thought maybe I could list some things here that are different that people might think are interesting:
1. No one owns or uses a clothes dryer. I don’t even think they exist here. Everyone, no matter what the weather, hangs them on anything to dry. It’s common to see them hanging from balconies everywhere. Hmmm…now that I think about it, that might be why the common architecture here includes small balconies on every window.
2. Almost every bar (which are very very common, at least 2 per block) serves tapas and food as well as alcohol. They are more like cafes than bars. Tapas are yummy treats that sit out in glass cases by the bar and tempt you with their beauty. Things like Spanish tortilla, which is eggs, potatoes and onions in the best way, or croissants with chocolate, or random things that each bar owner knows how to make and make very well.
3. Every building here is smaller, therefore tables and chairs and everything inside it are smaller. I don’t even think about it now, but the first night in the hotel in Madrid was shocking for me. Go figure, since I’m from a country that does everything big, and in most cases, too big. It’s kind of embarrassing to look at how conservative other countries are and think of how much we AREN’T. Actually, it’s kind of disgusting, when you think about how many people don’t have what we have, and how much other countries try to conserve when we don’t.
4. Therefore, the coches (cars..) are also smaller. The streets are smaller. Wait until you see the pictures I’ll put up. The small cars cram into the sides of the street to park. Cars drive like crazy here….crazy fast, crazy crazy…they don’t stop if you go when the crosswalk isn’t green, so it’s best just to wait. I still can’t believe the huge city buses fit and can drive around the sharp curves.
5. The milk and most other things aren’t really refrigerated. Sonia keeps our milk in a closet and only takes it out when she needs to open a new one. They buy their water in giant bottles, but I think we just refill our same couple bottles with tap water from the kitchen sink. Whatever, I’m still alive. I drank out of a public fountain in Segovia when I was thirsty. A little dirt is good for the immune system. Our fridge smells kind of funky because the fridge is kept at a much higher temperature. Some people would call this unsanitary, I call it not being a wasteful American. At the end of the day, I don’t die from food poisoning, so it must be ok.
6. A slice or two (or three in my case on some days) of french bread is eaten with every big lunch meal. Yum yum yum yum I love the bread here. I love dipping it in sauces, I love eating it with my plate of food, I love eating it plain, I love feeding it to the pavo reales in Campo Grande. I would sleep in crumbs of it in my bed at night, but Sonia would not approve. Breakfast is hot milk and cookies (for me) every morning and dinner is late late every night at about 9 or 10 pm.
7. Everyone smokes. No one in my immediate family smokes, and it’s rare in most of the
other extensions of my family as well. It’s obviously frowned upon in
the states, but here it’s more normal than not to smoke. It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. I kind of just think of it as part of the culture and go with it. That’s pretty much how I handle everything else here. I think a country that smokes is a small price to pay for all the other wonderful things they do in comparison to ummm…let’s see…what country have I been harping on my whole blog? Oh right, the US. I know that the US is wonderful in so many ways and blah blah blah and I am probably just feeling that way because I’m still in the honeymoon phase with Spain. I’m not oblivious to the dark side of this city and the country, but right now the good outweigh the bad.
8. Every place, house, bar, supermarket, etc. has pig legs everywhere. It’s very common in the north of Spain to have dried pig legs on counters everywhere. Sonia and Antonio told me why and I forgot, but I think it’s basically just their animal and “meat display” of choice, kind of like how ours is greasy McDonald’s hamburgers. It’s normal to shave a slice off and eat it like candy or throw it on some bread for a bocadillo.
9. I think I’ve seen ONE Spaniard wear flared jeans here. Good lord, do not wear anything but skinny jeans and boots if you want to look halfway normal here. A cute pair of boots are a goal of mine by the end of this trip. I don’t think I can go back to dressing American when I go back to the States. It just feels so classy and right here that everyone dresses themselves in such a presentable manner, and thinking about my daily sweatpants and everyone’s northface jackets in the states seems so…not classy at all. (Proud to have never owned a northface at this point, although they never seemed to catch my eye back home anyways like they did for the other 98% of the population that isn’t my parents, my brother and I. Maybe because especially after being here and seeing how little people spend on their jackets, it seems even more ludicrous to spend hundreds on a boring looking thing that says “northface.”) That’s another thing that I like about Spain. No brand names or letters or words on anything.
10. All the buildings are cute and have beautiful architecture and little balconies on every window. The streets are mostly brick and cool stone pieces unless you count the actual streets that the cars drive on. But all other side streets and streets in the plazas and sidewalks are beautiful. A lot of the buildings are lit with pretty colors at night, as are random little places in parks and plazas.
11. The people of Valladolid are incredibly serious. Sonia said it’s just a Valla thing, and that the rest of Spain is full of really open people. She also said that people speak the most formal and “correct” form of Spanish in the North, and specifically in Valladolid. In other parts of Spain it’s either sloppier or one of the other forms of Spanish that exist in Spain. But back to the seriousness…watch out about smiling or saying “hi” to someone on the street – it won’t be returned. And people stare. Ohhhh, do they stare. I wanted to “glare” back in the first few days, but our culture teacher kindly told us that the “national sport of Spain is pasear,” or walking, and instead of staring at the ground or being bored, they stare at people, at things, at whatever passes the time for them. Good to know they weren’t seeing right through my convincing Spanish ropa and into my American soul. If you bump into someone, it’s better not to say anything at all, because they won’t say anything to you. I was full of “lo siento’s” and “perdon’s” my first few days before I caught on.
That’s about it for now. It’s 10:30 pm and we’re at La Negra Flor and need to go and finish our Grammar and Lit homework for tomorrow. Also, Sonia’s dad has been battling cancer for the last 5 years or so, and it has finally spread to his entire body. Needless to say he is not doing well, and the feel I get from Sonia is that his body has about had it with this disease. So, if you have a second to think, pray for her dad and her family – that they have time together before God takes him and that he leaves us as painfree as possible! Thank you thank you, it will mean a lot to Sonia to know that others are thinking of him and the family!
from: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/ewadzinski/1/1264540644/tpod.html
